Contemporary Fiction

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

I found a stripped---you strip off the covers of mass market paperbacks, send the cover to the publisher to get credit and then throw away the book itself---copy of "The Crying Of Lot 49" in the garbage for Campus Textbook Exchange, Berkeley, where I was working back in 1979. And always thought there was something to finding the book in the trash, then very soon after finding another job at the Union 76 building (most recently the Bank Of America building) just across the Transbay Terminal. 

Meanwhile, right now, I'm reading Proust, which oughta give me a bit of appropiate background into the time period covered by 'Against The Day. Serves other purposes as well.

And I'll mention Nick Tosches as a favorite contemporary writer who keeps on churning out incredibly interesting fiction and non-fiction, with one book---"Dino, Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams"---a classic, an exemplar of 20th century three-fisted writing:

"RCA had marketed its first television receivers in 1939, and now, nine years later, there were still fewer than a million sets in America, and almost half of those in New York. Those who had them had not been able to see much. But now those ugly little devices were beginning to hum and flicker with gathering gales of gray insect fury, joy and plague, mediocrity and madness, from that vast funhouse maw of metastiic delights".


 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Ya Sam" <takoitov at hotmail.com>
> I found Gravity's
> >Rainbow in the library at Camp Howze, a US Army
> >facility 6 km from the DMZ, in the Republic of Korea,
> >in the summer of 1973, not long after it had been
> >published and, young daredevil that I was, without
> >asking anybody for a recommendation on an Internet
> >email group, I checked it out and read it, and went on
> >to read the other books Pynchon had published, again
> >without asking for anybody else's approval.
> 
> Right. That's why I'm not giving up on contemporary literature, because a 
> literary phenomenon of the scale similar to Proust, Joyce, Thomas Mann, 
> Pynchon may appear any time and I want to discover this writer for myself 
> the way you did it, without any advice 'from out there'.
> 
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